Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description provided in this section is not itself prior art to the claims and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Radio controlled mobile craft are vehicles or other mobile objects whose motion and perhaps other operational parameters can be controlled from a distance using a specialized transmitter or other controller. Such mobile craft could be air-based, land-based, and/or water-based, and could have hobby, commercial, military, or other use.
An example that has gained widespread attention in recent years is the quadcopter, also known as a quadrocoptor or quad rotor helicopter. A quadcopter is a multirotor helicopter that is lifted and propelled by four fixed-pitch propellers rotors, two of which rotate clockwise and the other two of which rotate counterclockwise. By precisely and accurately spinning these four propellers at different speeds through radio control, it is possible to control various directional movements of the quadcopter, such as hover, forward/backward movement, left/right movement, and yaw (rotation). In practice, a user may thus operate a handheld controller to control movement of the quadcopter by wireless sending of control signals that cause adjustment of the propellers' respective speeds. Further, the controller may also facilitate remote control of other features of the quadcopter, such as power, lights, sounds, and the like. In addition, the quadcopter itself may be equipped to wirelessly transmit to the controller, such as to acknowledge control commands, to report operational metrics, and/or to transmit a live video feed captured by an on-board camera.
Numerous other examples of radio controlled mobile craft are also known or may be developed later as well.